Dead Horse: 2 December 2010

Regarding Cablegate and Assange:

BDR

Silber (also here)

Greenwald, "The moral standards of WikiLeaks critics"

Karen Kwiatkowski, "The Proper Response to WikiLeaks"

Pepe Escobar, "Cracks in the wilderness of mirrors"

To some he is a traitor. To others he is the tool of a subtle propaganda campaign hatched by a spy agency. But what Julian Assange is really up to with WikiLeaks is more radical: crashing the carefully maintained information system that dominates our lives with its lies

And, less brightly:
re silber "okanogen" at Corrente, "Getting played"

An odd work of spin from Fareed Zakaria,
"WikiLeaks Shows the Skills of U.S. Diplomats"

A remarkably broad consensus has formed that WikiLeaks' latest data dump is a diplomatic disaster for the U.S. While there are debates over how the Obama Administration should respond, everyone agrees that the revelations have weakened America. But have they? I don't deny for a moment that many of the "wikicables" are intensely embarrassing, but the sum total of the output I have read is actually quite reassuring about the way Washington - or at least the State Department - works.

Assange seems to me the perfect illustration of a gestalt public figure. People see what they want when they look at him. I should say this isn't intrinsic to what he's trying to do but intrinsic to the whole situation. Do you wonder how many people , whether here or abroad, actually believe the charges against him have any merit, and are not a political smear? So much for Swedish neutrality, I guess.-JV

Matt Stoller, "End this Fed"

Modern American industrial policy is to push capital into housing, move manufacturing abroad, build a massive defense establishment, and maintain an oligarchic financial sector. This system isn’t a structural inevitability. (via BDR)

Two from Slate:
Timothy Noah, "McSurance"
Crap health coverage wins a regulatory victory.

Ted Conover, "The Pathetic Newburgh Four"
Should the FBI really be baiting sad-sack homegrown terrorists?

BBC: Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood 'faces heavy poll losses'

Rob Payne, "Not Complicated at All"

Terry Greene Sterling, Dallas Observer,"Whose Dole Is It, Anyway?"

The spread of technology: French Taser Death

John Blake, CNN: Is America on the path to 'permanent war'?

As the Afghanistan war enters its ninth year, author Andrew J. Bacevich and others ask: When does it end? They say the nation's national security leaders have put the U.S. on an unsustainable path to perpetual war.

(Richard Dreyfuss says we should call it the war against extremist islam. I guess we should listen to him because he's a famous actor. [video link])

Police seek domain closure powers: "